


it's my own desire, it's my own remorse

by areunasty



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Introspection, Mental Instability, set around very early season 1 - no spoilers, vague reference to a possible ED, vent fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-18
Updated: 2017-02-18
Packaged: 2018-09-25 08:57:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9812165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/areunasty/pseuds/areunasty
Summary: Addiction can take many forms, and Elliot considers himself a quiet master of them all.





	

**Author's Note:**

> please heed the trigger warnings! none of the self harm is graphic in any way, it's mostly just a referenced thing, but stay safe.

Elliot tries to go to Angela’s birthday party. He really does. Wears a stupid shirt under his hoodie, brushes his teeth, the whole nine yards. He _tries_. He goes to the goddamn wine bar, too packed and oddly lit, but loses his courage with his hand just inches from the door. The thought of it, wine, food, forced conversation. It shuts him down, sends his brain racing through everything that could go wrong. God, fuck. He can’t hold a conversation to save his life, no matter how many nervous, encouraging smiles Angela sends his way. The thought of having to talk to people he doesn’t know, it locks him down fast, turns his thighs to jelly and his feet back in the direction to his apartment. He feels stupid, inferior, hunched into his hoodie against the cold as he takes one step in front of another.

He feels like someone is following him the whole way home, watches men in trench coats past the safety of his hoodie like it’s life or death. Maybe it is. Panic is building in his chest, inexorable, all consuming. 

He comes home, he feeds Qwerty, he attempts to hold his attention with hacking the new temp Gideon employed a few days ago. Anything to stave off the impossible, the urge Elliot can feel crawling under his skin like anxiety but worse. Inevitable. He doesn’t dig up a lot on the temp; couple of relationships going on at the same time, a gambling habit, and it all coalesces into the bad feeling in his chest. No one’s good, not him, not Angela, not this fucking temp.

Somewhere around midnight, Elliot washes his hands and he cuts himself. It’s an old blade, pried from a sharpener in a fit of desperation months ago, and it does the job. He’s methodical about it, hands moving without his brain’s input. Full system shutdown. His daemon programme is running the show, and it does a better job than he ever has. 

The tension of the night, the aborted birthday get together, leaves him with a sigh as the first cut blooms red. The knot in his chest, so close to a panic attack but so alien, eases. He smokes a cigarette after, mind so empty that it must be happiness, or at least the closest he’s felt to it in months. Music is thumping through the floor, his neighbours back at it again, but nothing can touch him when he’s like this. It’s almost like a full system reboot, he feels together again like he hasn’t felt in too long. Bright eyed, alert, but almost sleepy with relief. His thigh stings, the smoke in his throat burns, but his chest is loose with it. 

It’s just another thing he uses to get through the day. A way to release the pent up dread in his chest, like a valve opening. A rush of steam, depressurised. Safe.

He sleeps on his left side, and the next day he wiggles into his skinny jeans and leaves for the office like nothing ever happened. The near-crying, the panic, the sickly _want_. It doesn’t matter. 

He speaks to Angela, brushes off Ollie, does his work. Nothing is out of place, and that’s exactly why he does it. It feels like a violent secret, his own personal evil, and he brushes his fingers over the thigh of his jeans throughout the day as a reminder. Sometimes, he presses his fingertips through the denim, to the tender skin underneath. The dull pain is a brisk reminder, restarts his brain, lifts him through the fog of the past few weeks. Better than medication, better than drugs, better than sex. It wakes him up like nothing he’s ever felt, keeps him numb like morphine never manages. Drugs wear off in hours. Open wounds take days to scab over, longer to heal.

It’s close to the ache of hunger in his gut, and he cradles the two pains close like the siblings he never had. No one has been there for him like hunger pain and self harm pain, and he’d fight anyone if they tried to take it away from him. It’s fucked up, it’s sick, Elliot knows, but so many people get away with awful things every day that he convinces himself that he can keep his vices. He doesn’t hurt anyone but himself with it, even if Angela’s gaze on his skinny wrists, his increasingly baggier clothes, is wounded, worried. It’s her fault for being concerned, he tells himself. Her look out if she chooses to spare anything like concern towards whatever he is. 

At night, he fantasises about turning himself inside out, his nails clawing bloody weals through his flesh as he pulls at his skin like the fabric of his hoodie. He thinks seriously about sinking the cherry of his cigarette, hovering dangerously between ashtray and skin, into his thigh, and dismisses it. 

He fucks Shayla to get himself out his head, and she tastes like cigarettes and smells like strawberry shampoo, and Elliot has to cry silently into his pillow as she sleeps next to him after, oblivious. Her skin is so soft and so warm under his hands, and he thinks that if he was someone else he might fall in love with her. But Elliot is who he is, and Shayla is who _she_ is, so they only fuck when they’re high and she doesn’t mention the marks on his skin. He supposes there’s something good, something honest, in that. 

Elliot thinks a lot about love when he has Shayla sleeping next to him. Maybe that means something, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe if this was another life they’d have a shot at something real. Something good, and healthy, and everything that Elliot is not. Here he is, jumping at shadows, paranoid out of his fucking mind, and here Shayla is. It isn’t to be, and Elliot smokes until his lungs burn and he’s so goddamn high he can’t do anything _but_ sleep. It takes him out of himself, for a while. Long enough to reorient himself, like a soft restart, and he needs to stop thinking of himself in terms of a long outdated piece of hardware but goddamn if it doesn’t help. Being a body is too much, two arms, two legs, one sluggish beating heart. It’s too much and if he thinks too hard about it he knew he’d drown in it. 

It helps to imagine his body is a robot, hard plate skin and a cold, impersonal inside. Pistoning joints, a core of electric and wires, a sleek curve of metal where his face should be. Angela wouldn’t like it, if she knew, but she wouldn’t like the idea of him driving a blade into his thigh either so it’s a lesser evil. His coping habits aren’t hers to veto anyway. Elliot had stopped worrying about Angela liking the things he did a long time ago, after realising that Angela didn’t approve of almost anything he did.

He feeds Qwerty, he gets high, he cuts himself, he eats when Angela tells him to and he goes to work with reminders of past violence carved into him like a tattoo. He ponders life, relationships, the possibility of bringing all this crashing down around his ears with one intricate piece of coding. He thinks about God, and he thinks about blood, about McDonalds and his father and his mother and the small angry piece of himself he decides to not give a name to. To give something a name is to give it power, and Elliot spends his time keeping things nameless and watching the dark suits out of the veil of his hoodie like it’s his job.

One day, Shayla says to him, “D’you wanna meet my brother?”

It’s offhand, casual in that lazy rasp she has, and Elliot freezes. His shoulders are up around his ears, he can tell. Last night’s inescapable self harm binge burns through his jeans, sharp and hot like cat scratches. 

“No.” He says, voice rough and quick, and doesn’t look at Shayla as he says it. He couldn’t bear the look on her face, he thinks, whether it’s disappointment or relief. His hands itch for a hit, and he’s snorting morphine just seconds after she leaves for the night. He can still hear her footsteps, fuck, but nothing matters under the haze. It’s not like it’s a secret, anyway. Nothing’s a secret, with her. He’s been laid bare before her more times than he can count, and he’s never missed the way she never lingers over his scars. 

Addiction can take many forms, and Elliot considers himself a quiet master of them all. He falls back against the couch cushions, sinuses burning, and loses himself to a slipstream of time as his heart pounds morphine through him. It’s peaceful, like this, and he lets his eyes close as the consuming dread and anxiety of the day ebbs out of him like the tide.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading ! title from everybody wants to rule the world, because i've been bumping the mr robot soundtrack for days
> 
> comments r always good !


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